Rosicrucianism and Modern Initiation

Schmidt Number: S-5576

On-line since: 30th September, 2006

IV

The
Relationship of Earthly Man to the Sun

(Heart-Knowledge
and the Attitude of the Rosicrucian Schools)

What I have been telling you in recent lectures requires to be carried
a little further. I have tried to give you a picture of the flow of
spiritual knowledge through the centuries, and of the form it has
taken in recent times, and I have been able to show how from the
fifteenth until the end of the eighteenth or even the beginning of
the nineteenth century, the spiritual knowledge that was present
before that period as clear and concrete albeit instinctive
knowledge, showed itself in this later age more in a devotion of
heart and soul to the Spiritual, to all that is of the Spirit in the
world.

We have seen how the
knowledge man possessed of Nature and of how the spiritual world
works in Nature, is still present in the eleventh, twelfth and
thirteenth centuries. In a personality like Agrippa of Nettesheim,
whom I have described in my book
Mysticism and Modern Thought,
we have one who was still fully possessed of the knowledge, for
example, that in the several planets of our system are spiritual
Beings of quite definite character and kind.

In his writings, Agrippa of
Nettesheim assigns to each single planet what he calls the
Intelligence of the planet. This points to traditions which
were still extant from olden times, and even in his day were
something more than traditions. To look up to a planet in the way
that became customary in later Astronomy and is still customary
today, would have been utterly impossible to a man like Agrippa of
Nettesheim. The external planet, nay, every external star was no more
than a sign, an announcement, so to say, of the presence of spiritual
Beings, to whom one could look up with the eye of the soul, when one
looked in the direction of the star. And Agrippa of Nettesheim knew
that the Beings who are united with the single stars are the Beings
who rule the inner existence of the star or the planet, rule also the
movements of the planet in the Universe, the whole activity of the
particular star. And such Beings he called: the Intelligence of the
star.

Agrippa knew also how, at
the same time, hindering Beings work from the star, Beings who
undermine the good deeds of the star. They too work from out of the
star and also into it; and these Beings he called Demons of
the star. And together with this knowledge went an understanding of
the Earth, that saw in the Earth too a heavenly body having its
Intelligence and its Demon. The understanding however for star
Intelligence and star Demonology was little by little completely
lost, with all that was involved in it. What was essentially involved
in it may be expressed in the following way.

The Earth was of course
looked upon as ruled in her inner activity, in her movement in the
Cosmos, by Intelligences whom one could bring together under the name
of the Intelligence of the Earth star. But what was the Intelligence
of the Earth star, for the men of Agrippa's time? It is
exceedingly difficult today even to speak of these things, because
the ideas of men have travelled very far away from what was accepted
as a matter of course in those times by men of insight and
understanding. The Intelligence of the Earth star was Man
himself, the human being as such. They saw in Man a being who had
received a task from the Spirituality of the Worlds, not merely, as
modern man imagines, to walk about on the Earth, or to travel about
it in trains, to buy and sell, to write books, and so forth and so
forth — no, they conceived Man as a being to whom the
World-Spirit had given the task to rule and regulate the Earth, to
bring law and order into all that has to do with the place of the
Earth in the Cosmos. Their conception of Man was expressed by saying:
Through what he is, through the forces and powers he bears within his
being, Man gives to the Earth the impulse for her movement around the
Sun, for her movement further in Universal Space.

There was in very truth
still a feeling for this. It was known that the task had once been
allotted to Man, that Man had really been made the Lord of the Earth
by the World-Spirituality, but in the course of his evolution had not
shown himself equal to the task, had fallen from his high estate.
When men are speaking of knowledge nowadays it is very seldom that
one hears even a last echo of this view. What we find in religious
belief concerning the Fall really goes back ultimately to this idea;
for there the point is that originally Man had quite another position
on the Earth and in the Universe from the position he takes today; he
has fallen from his high estate. Setting aside however this religious
conception and considering the realm of thought, where men think they
have knowledge that they have attained by definite and correct
methods, it is only here and there that we can still find today an
echo of the ancient knowledge that once proceeded from instinctive
clairvoyance, and that was well aware of Man's task and of his
Fall into his present narrow limitations.

It may still happen, for
example, that one may have a conversation with a person — I am
here relating facts — who has thought very deeply, who has also
acquired very deep knowledge concerning this or that matter in the
spiritual realm. The conversation turns on whether Man, as he stands
on Earth today, is really a creature who is self-contained, who
carries his whole being and nature within him. And such a personality
as I have described will say to you, that this cannot be. Man must
really in his nature be a far more comprehensive being —
otherwise he could not have the striving he has now, he could not
develop the great idealism of which we can see such fine and lofty
examples; in his true nature Man must be a great and comprehensive
being, who has somehow or other committed a cosmic sin, as a
consequence of which he has been banished within the limits of this
present earthly existence, so that today he is really sitting
imprisoned as it were in a cage. You may still meet with this view
here and there as a late straggler, as it were. But speaking
generally, where shall we find one who accounts himself a scientist,
who seriously occupies himself with these great and far-reaching
questions? And yet it is only by facing them that man can ever find
his way to an existence worthy of him as man.

It was, then, really so
that Man was regarded as the bearer of the Intelligence of the Earth.
But now, a person like Agrippa of Nettesheim ascribed to the Earth
also a Demon. When we go back to the twelfth or thirteenth century,
we find this Demon of the Earth to be a Being who could only become
what he became on the Earth, because he found in Man the tool for his
activity.

In order to understand
this, we must acquaint ourselves with the way men thought about the
relationship of the Earth to the Sun, or of Earthly man to the Sun,
in those days. And if I am now to describe to you how they understood
this relationship, then I must again speak in Imaginations: for these
things will not suffer themselves to be confined in abstract
concepts. Abstract concepts came later, and they are very far from
being able to span the truth; we have therefore to speak in pictures,
in Imaginations.

Although, as I have described in my
Outline of Occult Science,
the Sun separated
itself from the Earth, or rather separated the Earth off from itself,
it is nevertheless the original abode of Man. For ever since the
beginning of the Saturn existence Man was united with the whole
planetary system including the Sun. Man has not his home on Earth, he
has on Earth only a temporary resting place. He is in truth,
according to the view that prevailed in those olden times, a
Sun-being. He is united in his whole being and existence with the
Sun. And since this is so, he ought as a being of the Sun to stand
quite differently on the Earth than he actually does. He ought to
stand on the Earth in such a way that it should suffice for the Earth
to have the impulse to bring forth the seed of Man in etheric form
from out of the mineral and plant kingdoms, and the Sun then to
fructify the seed brought forth from the Earth. Thence should arise
the etheric human form, which should itself establish its own
relationship to the physical substances of the Earth, and itself take
on Earth substantiality. The contemporaries of Agrippa of Nettesheim
— Agrippa's own knowledge was, unfortunately, somewhat
clouded, but better contemporaries of his did really hold the view
that Man ought not to be born in the earthly way he now is, but Man
ought really to come to being in his etheric body through the
interworking of Sun and Earth, and only afterwards, going about the
Earth as an etheric being, give himself earthly form. The seeds of
Man should grow up out of the Earth with the purity of plant-life,
appearing here and there as ethereal fruits of the Earth, darkly
shining; these should then in a certain season of the year be
overshone, as it were, by the light of the Sun, and thereby assume
human form, but etheric still; then Man should draw to himself
physical substance — not from the body of the mother, but from
the Earth and all that is thereon, incorporating it into himself from
the kingdoms of the Earth. Thus — they thought — should
have been the manner of Man's appearance on the Earth, in
accordance with the purposes of the Spirit of the Worlds.

And the development that
came later was due to the fact that Man had allowed to awaken within
him too deep an urge, too intense a desire for the earthly and
material. Thereby he forfeited his connection with the Sun and the
Cosmos, and could only find his existence on Earth in the form of the
stream of inheritance. Thereby, however, the Demon of the Earth began
his work; for the Demon of the Earth would not have been able to do
anything with men who were Sun-born. When Sun-born man came to dwell
on the Earth, he would have been in very truth the Fourth Hierarchy.
And one would have had to speak of Man in the following manner. One
would have had to say: First Hierarchy: Seraphim, Cherubim,
Thrones; Second Hierarchy: Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes; Third
Hierarchy: Angels, Archangels, Archai; Fourth Hierarchy:
Man — three different shades or gradations of the human, but
none the less making the Fourth Hierarchy.

But because Man gave rein
to his strong impulses in the direction of the physical, he became,
not the being on the lowest branch, as it were, of the Hierarchies,
but instead the being at the summit of the highest branch of the
earthly kingdoms: mineral kingdom, plant kingdom, animal kingdom,
human kingdom. This was the picture of how Man stood in the world.

Moreover, because Man does
not find his proper task on the Earth, the Earth herself has not her
right and worthy position in the Cosmos. For since Man has fallen,
the true Lord of the Earth is not there. What has happened? The true
Lord of the Earth is not there, and it became necessary for the
Earth, not being governed from herself in her place in the Cosmos, to
be ruled from the Sun; so that the tasks that should really be
carried out on Earth fell to the Sun. The man of mediaeval times
looked up to the Sun and said: In the Sun are certain Intelligences.
They determine the movement of the Earth in the Cosmos; they govern
what happens on the Earth. Man ought, in reality, to do this; the
Sun-forces ought to work on Earth through Man for the existence of
the Earth. Hence that significant mediaeval conception that was
expressed in the words: The Sun, the unlawful Prince of this world.

And now reflect, my dear
friends, how infinitely the Christ Impulse was deepened through such
conceptions. The Christ became, for these mediaeval men, the Spirit
Who was not willing to find His further task on the Sun, Who would
not remain among those who directed the Earth in unlawful manner from
without. He wanted to take His path from the Sun to the Earth, to
enter into the destiny of Man and the destiny of Earth, to experience
Earth events and pass along the ways of Earth evolution, sharing the
lot of Man and of Earth.

Therewith, for mediaeval
man, the Christ is the one Being Who in the Cosmos saved the task of
Man on the Earth. Now you have the connection. Now you can see why,
in Rosicrucian times, it was again and again impressed upon the
pupil: “O Man, thou art not what thou art; the Christ had to
come, to take from thee thy task, in order that He might perform it
for thee.”

A great deal in Goethe's
Faust has come down from mediaeval conceptions, although
Goethe himself did not understand this. Recall, my dear friends, how
Faust conjures up the Earth Spirit. With these mediaeval conceptions
in mind, we can enter with feeling and understanding into how this
Earth Spirit speaks. —

In the tides of Life,
In Action's storm,
A fluctuant wave,
A shuttle free,
Birth and the Grave,
An eternal Sea,
A weaving, flowing
Life, all glowing:
Thus at Time's humming loom ‘tis my hand prepares
The garment of Life which the Deity wears.

Who is it that Faust is really conjuring up? Goethe himself, when he
was writing Faust, most assuredly did not fully know. But if we go
back from Goethe to the mediaeval Faust and listen to this mediaeval
Faust in whom Rosicrucian wisdom was living, then we learn how he too
wanted to conjure up a spirit. But whom did he want to conjure up in
the Earth Spirit? He did not ever speak of the Earth Spirit, he spoke
of Man. The deep longing and striving of mediaeval man was: to
be Man. For he felt and knew that as Earth man he is not truly Man.
How can manhood be found again? The way Faust is rebuffed, pushed on
one side by the Earth Spirit is a picture of how man in his earthly
form is rebuffed by his own being. And this is why many accounts of
conversion to Christianity in the Middle Ages show such extraordinary
depth of feeling. They are filled with the sense that men have
striven to attain the manhood that is lost, and have had to give up
in despair, have rightly despaired of being able to find in
themselves, within earthly physical life, this true and genuine
manhood; and so they have arrived at the point where they must say:
Human striving for true manhood must be abandoned, earthly man must
leave it to the Christ to fulfil the task of the Earth.

In this time, when man's
relation to true manhood as well as his relation to the Christ was
still understood in what I would call a superpersonal-personal manner
— in this time Spirit-knowledge, Spirit-vision was still a real
thing, it was still a content of experience. It ceased to be so with
the fifteenth century. Then came the tremendous change, which no one
really understood. But those who know of such things know how in the
fifteenth, in the sixteenth centuries, and even later, there was a
Rosicrucian school, isolated, scarcely known to the world, where over
and over again a few pupils were educated, and where above all, care
was taken that one thing should not be forgotten but be preserved as
a holy tradition. And this was the following. — I will give it
to you in narrative form.

Let us say, a new pupil
arrived at this lonely spot to receive preparation. The so-called
Ptolemaic system was first set before him, in its true form, as it
had been handed down from olden times, not in the trivial way it is
explained nowadays as something that has been long ago supplanted,
but in an altogether different way. The pupil was shown how the Earth
really and truly bears within herself the forces that are needed to
determine her path through the Universe. So that to have a correct
picture of the World, it must be drawn in the old Ptolemaic sense:
the Earth must be for Man in the centre of the Universe, and the
other stars in their corresponding revolutions be controlled and
directed by the Earth. And the pupil was told: If one really studies
what are the best forces in the Earth, then one can arrive at no
other conception of the World than this. In actual fact, however, it
is not so. It is not so on account of man's sin. Through man's
sin, the Earth — so to speak, in an unauthorised, wrongful way
— has gone over into the kingdom of the Sun; the Sun has become
the regent and ruler of earthly activities. Thus, in
contradistinction to a World-System given by the Gods to men with the
Earth in the centre, could now be set another World-System, that has
the Sun in the centre, and the Earth revolving round the Sun —
it is the system of Copernicus.

And the pupil was taught
that here is a mistake in the Cosmos, a mistake in the Universe
brought about by human sin. This knowledge was entrusted to the pupil
and he had to engrave it deeply in his heart and soul. — Men
have overthrown the old World-System (so did the teacher speak) and
set another in its place; and they do not know that this other, which
they take to be correct, is the outcome of their own human guilt. It
is really nothing else than the expression, the revelation of human
guilt, and yet men take it to be the right and correct view. What has
happened in recent times? (The teacher is speaking to the pupil.)
Science has suffered a downfall through the guilt of man. Science has
become a science of the Demon.

About the end of the
eighteenth century such communications became impossible, but until
that time there were always pupils here and there of some lonely
Rosicrucian School, who received their spiritual nourishment imbued
as it were with this feeling, with this deep understanding.

Even such a man as
Leibnitz, the great philosopher, was led by his own thought and
deliberation to try and find somewhere a place of learning where the
relation between the Copernican and Ptolemaic Systems could be
correctly formulated. But he was not able to find any such place.

Things like this need to be
known if one is to understand aright, in all its shades of meaning,
the great change that has come about in the last centuries in the way
man looks on himself and on the Universe. And with this weakening of
man's living connection with himself, with this estrangement of
man from himself came afterwards the tendency to cling to the
external intellect that today rules all. Is this external intellect
verily human experience? No, for were it human experience, it could
not live so externally in mankind as it does. The intellect has
really no sort of connection with what is individual and personal,
with the single individual man; it is well nigh a convention. It does
not flow out of inner human experience; rather it approaches man as
something outside him.

You may feel how the
intellect became external by comparing the way in which Aristotle
himself imparted his Logic to his pupils with the way in which it was
taught much later, say in the seventeenth century. — You will
remember how Kant says that Aristotle's Logic has not advanced
since his time. — In the time of Aristotle, Logic was still
thoroughly human. When a man was taught to think logically, he had a
feeling as though — if again I may be allowed to express myself
in imaginative terms — as though he were thrusting his head
into cold water and thereby became estranged from himself for a
moment; or else he had a feeling such as Alexander expressed when
Aristotle wanted to impart Logic to him: You are pressing together
all the bones of my head! It is the feeling of something external.
But in the seventeenth century this externality was taken as a matter
of course. Men learned how from the major and minor premise the
consequent must be deduced. They learned what we find treated so
ironically in Goethe's Faust:

“The first was so, the second so.
Therefore the third and fourth are so:
Were not the first and second, then
The third and fourth had never been!
There will your mind be drilled and braced,
As if in Spanish boots ‘twere laced!”

Whether, like Alexander, one feels the bones of one's head all pressed
together, or whether one is laced up in Spanish boots with all this
First, Second, Third, Fourth — we have in either case a true
picture of what one feels.

But this externality of
abstract thought was no longer felt in the time when Logic
began to be taught in the schools. Today of course this has more or
less ceased. Logic is no longer specifically taught in the schools.
It is rather as if there had once been a time when hundreds and
hundreds of people had put on the same uniform under direction, and
done it with enthusiasm, and then afterwards there came a time when
they did it of their own free will without giving it a thought.

During all the time however
when the Logic of the abstract was gaining the upper hand, the old
spiritual knowledge was incapable of going forward. Hence we see it
in its turn becoming external, and assuming a form of which examples
are to be found in the writings of Eliphas Levi or the publications
of Saint-Martin. These are the last offshoots of the old
Spirit-knowledge and Spirit-vision.

What do we find in a book
such as Eliphas Levi's,
The Dogma and Ritual of High Magic?
In the first place there are all kinds of signs — Triangles,
Pentagrams and so forth. We find words from languages in use in
bygone ages, especially from the Hebrew. And we find that what in
earlier times was life and at the same time knowledge that could pass
over into man's action and into man's ideas — this
we find has become bereft of ideas on the one hand, and on the other
hand has degenerated into external magic. There is speculation as to
the symbolic meaning of this or that sign, concerning all of which
the modern man, if he is honest, would have to confess that he can
find nothing particular in it. There are also practices connected
with all manner of rites, while those who spoke of these rites and
frequently practised them were far from having any clear notion at
all of their spiritual connection. Such books are invariably pointers
to what was once understood in olden times, was once an inward
knowledge-experience, but when Eliphas Levi, for example, was writing
his books, was no longer understood. As for Saint-Martin — of
him I have already written in the
Goetheanum Weekly.

Thus we see how what had
once been interwoven into the soul-and-spirit of man's life,
could not he held there but fell a victim to complete want of
understanding. The common impulse and striving for the Divine that
shows itself in the feeling of man from the fifteenth to the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is genuine and true. Beautiful
things are to be found in this impulse, things lovely and sublime.
Much that has come from these times and that is far too little
noticed today has about it as it were a magic breath — the
genuine spell of the Spiritual.

Side by side, however, with
all this, a seed is sprouting, the seed of the lack of understanding
of old spiritual truths. We have therewith a hardening, ossifying
process, and a growing impossibility to approach the Spiritual in a
way that is in accord with the age. We come across men of the
eighteenth century who speak of a downfall of all that is human, and
of the rise of a terrible materialism. Often it seems as though what
these men of the eighteenth century say applies just as well to our
own time. And yet it is not so; what they say does not apply to the
last two-thirds of the nineteenth century. For in the nineteenth
century a further stage has been reached. What was still regarded in
the eighteenth century with a certain abhorrence on account of its
demoniacal character, has come to be taken quite as a matter of
course. The men of the nineteenth century had not the power to say:
Copernicus! — Yes; but such a conception of the Universe was
only able to arise because man did not become on Earth that which he
should have become, and so the Earth was left without a ruler, and
the rulership passed over to the unrighteous lords of the world (the
expression occurs again and again in mediaeval writings), these took
over the leadership of the Earth — even as the Christ left the
Sun and united Himself with the destiny of the Earth.

Only now, at the end of the
nineteenth century, has it again become possible to look into these
things with a clear vision such as man possessed in olden times; only
now in the Michael Age has the possibility come again. We have spoken
repeatedly of the dawn of the Michael Age, and of its character. But
there are tasks that belong to this Michael Age, and it is possible
now to point to these tasks, after all that we have been considering
in the Christmas Meeting and since, about the evolution of
Spirit-vision throughout the centuries.